The US House Foreign Relations Committee’s decision to brand the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during World War I as “genocide” prompted predictable anger from the Turkish Government and its citizens. As Guy Rundle noted in Crikey this week, the extent to which the Armenian massacres amounted to systematic extermination is the subject of genuine, and inevitably furious, debate.

In truth, however, the use of the term “genocide” has nothing to with its accuracy as a description of historical reality, and everything to do with undermining the moral authority of those so labelled. To be accused of genocide is the ultimate ad hominem attack, aligning the target with the gold-standard practitioners of extermination, the Nazis (who carefully studied the Armenian massacres).

Moreover, victims of “genocide” automatically acquire a morally-privileged status and the right to special consideration. The not-so-subtext here of course derives from the establishment of Israel after WW2.

Given that organised slaughter tends to be the prerogative of governments, the word has been a favourite of the Left for decades.

We’ve seen plenty of this in Australia (even putting aside that the “Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide” murdered a Turkish diplomat here in 1980).

An entire front of the culture wars raged over whether the “stolen generations” merited the G-word, with Sir Ronald Wilson specifically arguing that it did not necessarily have to mean systematic extermination.

The notion that “genocide” could mean any form of racial discrimination has taken hold to such an extent amongst Aboriginal activists that participants in this year’s 1967 referendum anniversary events made a verb of it and condemned the Howard Government for “genociding us”.

Unlike, say, the word “decimate”, which is now hardly ever used correctly, this is no accidental drift of meaning. Like the regular claims that Western governments practise, encourage or fund genocide in Africa, it is a clear attempt to impute outright evil to the target.

It also undermines rigorous debate – anyone attempting to argue that the term is inappropriate for an historical event has to preface everything with “I’m no David Irving but…” Even using quotation marks around “genocide” feels like an act of insensitive relativism.

But governments themselves have cottoned onto how powerful this term can be – including the US, which itself gets labelled “genocidal” more often than virtually any other entity. The Clinton Administration accused Serbia of genocide in Kosovo and George W. Bush declared that the Darfur conflict amounted to genocide – which, predictably, prompted reflexive anti-American left-wingers to defend various war criminals and mass murderers. Now Turkey is on the receiving end, albeit for historical actions.

The devaluation of “genocide” won’t stop there, of course. Kevin Rudd calls for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be tried for “inciting genocide”. The EU is considering laws against “genocide denial”. You can now, inevitably, do courses in “Genocide Studies”. Even the Howard Government’s Northern Territory intervention has been labelled “a form of genocide”.

This word has long since ceased to have anything to do with some moral assessment of the difference between a massacre, ethnic cleansing and full-fledged extermination (even if such a distinction mattered a whit to the victims). It is simply a political and cultural weapon – and one of rapidly decreasing value.